Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been peacefully protesting the ongoing occupation of their land and advocating for their right, as well as that of Palestinian refugees, to return to lands illegally occupied by the Israeli state since March 30 of this year. There are currently over five million registered Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, according to the United Nations relief and work agency for Palestinian refugees. The Israeli government’s response to these nonviolent demonstrations is brutal and is in flagrant violation of international law.

Last fall, in the early days of the #MeToo movement, One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn was accused of sexual harassment in an open letter signed by 18 women in the cast and crew of the show. Among the accusers were stars Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush, who played best friends Peyton Sawyer and Brooke Davis, respectively.

In my four years as a Writing Seminars major, I was often asked if I would double with something else. The answer was always no — I reveled in my specific coursework, thought the Writing Sems requirements were broad enough and thought that nothing else was so compelling that I should devote more time to it than a few classes. I also didn’t love the implication that I needed to add a second major for practicality purposes. I was determined to be just Writing Sems, in all its glory.

Recently, my friends and I went to a reading at which five finalists for a literary award presented some of their work. Three of these finalists read snippets of fiction, and the other two read selections of their poetry. Four of these finalists were women, with one man standing among them.

This year’s SGA executive election is essentially uncontested. Three out of four positions have a single candidate running, and only two candidates are running for the position of Executive President. The New Horizons ticket — comprised of Noh Mebrahtu for Executive President, AJ Tsang for Executive Vice President, Mi Tu for Executive Treasurer and Aspen Williams for Executive Secretary — is currently running against Jessup Jong, who is vying for Executive President. After speaking with all the candidates, we are pleased that they are all passionate about the wellbeing of the student body and shaping the direction that the school can take in the coming years. That being said, we fully endorse the New Horizons ticket.

Last year, as I was wheeling a patient into the Hopkins Hospital, she started coughing. Normally, that wouldn’t be in an issue. We were in a hospital after all. Having gotten into an accident, she needed a lot of help from the social service group that I work with to find her a new source of income. The coughing issue spiraled quickly, becoming unexpected and uncontrollable, so I quickly rushed her inside. After drinking some water and feeling more stable, she finally spoke up.

Last Friday, Maryland state legislators announced that they are withdrawing their support for the bill that would have allowed the University to create a private police force. This announcement came as a victory for the many student and community organizers who have been working tirelessly over the past couple of weeks to defeat the bill.

For decades, Hopkins students have yearned for a student center: a central space for the collective pursuit of our social and mental wellbeing. Hopkins is an outlier. A student center exists at nearly every other college and university campus in the United States (including the 33 peer institutions to which Hopkins compares itself), but not here. More schools have a student center than an armed private police force.

Before #MeToo, I did not take a very close look at the personal lives of artists whose work I admired. I was naive enough to think that in the 21st century, I could not possibly have been conditioned to respect sexual offenders.

Residential Advisors (RAs) are some of the first people we meet upon arriving at Hopkins. They shape our first year experience and ease us through the transition from high school to college. The responsibilities of an RA go beyond just the hours they spend on duty. The job is vital to the emotional wellbeing of students and the position can often be emotionally, physically and psychologically taxing on RAs themselves.

The University’s adamant insistence on the need to create a private police force is a rushed attempt to circumvent student and community input and involvement in an issue which raises serious concerns of accountability and transparency.

We live in a renewed age of political demonstrations, as marginalized groups have begun to demand attention and call for social and legislative change with heightened urgency. The Women’s March, Black Lives Matter rallies and resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline will be remembered alongside the likes of the 1963 March on Washington as defining points in American history.

Most people raised in the U.S. were taught the same thing about the purpose of testing in our education system: to prove just how much you know and to give you a grade based on how much of the class material you’ve successfully learned and memorized. Of course, some people are better test takers than others, and their scores reflect that. But nevertheless, tests still served as a measure of knowledge. For a while, in high school, that logic continued to hold true. As classes got harder, some tests would have a curve to boost lower grades to reflect the fact that if everyone in the class got a low score, it was likely a function of an overly difficult class rather than the students’ failure to learn. However, once in college, all that reasoning seems to have fallen to the cruel whims of the Bell Curve.

A protest on campus hosted by Students Against Private Police advertised with a now-famous picture of the University of California (UC), Davis police pepper-spraying peaceful protestors. In her book Campus Sex, Campus Security, Jennifer Doyle writes about the above incident of brutality. As she explains, the UC Chancellor said, “We were worried about non-affiliates... we were worried about having very young [university] girls and other students with older people who come from the outside.” The Chancellor feared black men from Oakland coming on campus and assaulting the University’s women. The fear of sexual assault comes from a racist national mythology of the black male rapist — not feminism. The University sees women as liabilities, not autonomous beings. Sexual assault is mostly student-on-student and vastly under-reported by both victims and the University in crime statistics. Crime data is skewed towards robbery and theft — misrepresenting those from the “outside.”

On Monday, March 5 the University announced its intent to create a private police force. In the following week and a half, students created a petition against the proposal that has since garnered thousands of signatures; protested in front of University President Ronald J. Daniels’ home for the first time in recent memory; led phone banking efforts to voice their discontent to Maryland legislators; and expressed their concerns at forums both at Homewood and at the Medical Campus.

For the majority of the 20th century, Hopkins was not the primary economic engine of Baltimore City. That title belonged to a massive steel mill whose workers were part of a strong union, operating out of Sparrows Point in southeast Baltimore — Bethlehem Steel’s Baltimore plant. Up until its decline in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the mill was the crown jewel of an industrial Baltimore, perfectly positioned in a major port and railroad hub in the middle of the eastern shore.

I’ll start with a disclaimer: This article is going to discuss my experience with the Bystander Intervention Training (BIT) program during my freshman year. The program may have changed or evolved since my experience. I’m not criticizing the way it works today, but what happened during my BIT session was not okay.

This is an election year, and for most American voters the November midterm races for the House and the Senate are of paramount concern. But Americans should also pay close attention to elections happening abroad, particularly those in Italy, because they highlight important global trends which have wide-reaching ramifications.

On Feb. 22, 2018 the Task Force on Student Mental Health and Well-being released a report outlining the insufficiently met mental health needs of students and strategies to better meet those needs. Three major recommendations called on Hopkins to “promote a climate of awareness,” “to provide greater access to mental health services” and “offer, and in some cases require, training on mental health awareness and resources for faculty, staff, and students.”